culture articles

It's hard to remember a time when all the footage of goats that sound like humans, or Taylor Swift videos, or mash-ups of goats sounding like humans singing to Taylor Swift weren't just a tap away. But it was only…

If Football—that is, the American National Football League football—used the same naming scheme as "Dungeons & Dragons," we'd call it "Beer Commercials & Cheerleaders." Like dungeons and dragons, beer commercials and cheerleaders are two things that not everyone likes. They are also, however, not The Point of their respective games.

Video games are changing. Increasingly, we're seeing a subset of players focus their attention on one single video game instead of many. League of Legends, World of Tanks. Games that change. Games that are constantly evolving. Games that shift and transform according to the needs of their user base.

I just returned from a holiday in Japan, a country with a fascinating culture for electronics. My biggest takeaway is how mainstream gadgets are in Japan; unlike most other countries, there seems to be electronics stores at every corner, with…

What do a giant green lizard, a fish cam, a rubber chicken and no dress code all have in common? In the 1990s, the answer was Netscape – one of the hottest Internet and telecommunications firms in the world at…

Twenty-thirteen has been an eventful year marked by a changing landscape in the computing world, product refreshes in the mobile scene, a new generation of consoles, the rise of Bitcoin and the harsh realization that pretty much nothing you do online (and sometimes offline) is private. Our yearly recount of the most relevant tech happenings awaits...

What these reviews lack in helpfulness they make up for in gleeful goofiness. For its part, Amazon hasn't tried to dissuade this phenomenon, as these self-generating memes can actually increase sales. For example, when an unexceptional graphic T-shirt featuring three howling wolves caught the ire of the sarcastic community in 2008, it went on to become one of the top selling pieces of apparel on Amazon that year.

Cold rain drizzles outside. Inside, everything is pink, round, and frilly. The first floor of this otaku (geek) retailer is plastered with release info for new PC games—adult PC games. The shop is located in Den-Den Town, Osaka's geek and gaming district, on a street known as "Ota Road", short for "otaku road". It's easy to stumble into shops like this and find an array of dating games, some of which are erotic.

The vast majority of these games are not exactly mainstream in Japan, but their presence is palpable in a geek neighborhood like this. But what Western gamers think of PC games—the games from developers like Valve and Blizzard—aren't. It's not that those Western PC games don't exist; they just don't smack you in the face.

As the year comes to an end it's time to look back at the most interesting and relevant tech stories of 2012. Numerous trends consolidated during 2012: Apple’s dominance in the sector, mobile growth, fast-paced releases on the smartphone world, the Windows 8 launch, only to name a few.

This year we have divided stories in 12 heavily packed categories, with nearly 500 hand-picked headlines total. Feel free to jump around between your favored topics, but try not to miss the tech culture section where we revisit some of the most entertaining stories we covered this year. Here’s our take on 2012…